• The sale of one percent milk has declined nearly 26 percent since the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

• A 2010 survey found 3.1 percent of Americans claim to celebrate one or fewer holidays in a year. Of the holidays observed by these single-day celebrators the top reported was Kwanza, followed closely by the birthday of individual or their spouse.

• The title lyric of the Old English carol "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" was originally a sexual innuendo.

• In 2007, "Season's Greetings" replaced "Happy Holidays" as the most-used holiday banner text in American retail stores, which replaced "Merry Christmas" in 1979.

• Based on a global sample of 2009 symphony season programs, G.F. Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" is performed eight times each December for every one time it is sung during the rest of the year.

• Most of the world's French fries are neither French nor fried.

• The average trip on the Metrorail transit system in Washington, D.C. spans 8.8 stops and includes 0.9 transfers.

• Pakistan is the only non-English-speaking country that observes Daylight Saving Time.

• Geneticists discovered in 2004 that humans' ability to see the color red stems from a genetic mutation that took place in a common ancestor two million years ago. Projections indicate that, in another million years, red color receptors will be a recessive gene and appear only in a minority of humans.

• NBA basketball players average a one in 11 success ratio for three-point shots.

• Animator and studio magnate Walt Disney, long suspected of anti-Semitism, was half Jewish by way of his mother.

• Jude Law stipulates in his film contracts that none of his movies may be preceded in theaters by any previews in which he also appears.

• Universal Pictures, now a major entertainment empire, was established as a real estate holdings firm in 1908.

• Every financially successful movie directed by Robert Rodriguez includes an appearance by Quentin Tarantino, either as a cameo or a major role. Rodriguez has directed three box-office flops in which Tarantino did not appear, although one of them, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D, features the actor in a brief, uncredited, voice-only role.

• No wide-release American film since 1981 has actually shown an automobile being driven through a pane of glass.